


wake up your saints

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Android Lil Hal, Earth C (Homestuck), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 06:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15309243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: “You know,” you say, when the drink warms your throat enough, “you know he’ll be cheesed as all-get-out.”“I know.” Dirk lifts hair from the body’s nape and plugs some wires he stripped off the shades. “I’m mad at myself all the time.”Then he does this funny thing, like a kiss, to the artificial skin just under the wire, at the base of the spine. You can see his breath: it mists and crackles like a fucking wisp.The AR opens his eyes.





	wake up your saints

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aphwhales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphwhales/gifts).



> prompt:  
> go nuts honestly, but something with them dealing with their problems would be cool. cant have been easy to be stuck in glasses for 3+ years, or to live all alone in the middle of the ocean or on an island. also would be nice to see jake and dirk maybe talking things out with hal wrt recognizing him as an actual person with actual feelings
> 
> ayyyy here they are, in all their colourful lexical glory  
> thank you very much for participating and giving me the opportunity to really try my hand at jake and hal!!  
> hopefully the end result turned out ok, stay frosty

“You’re absolutely sure,” Dirk is saying from his perch, “that you don’t mind?”

It’s been a while since you’ve seen him this uncertain. Even in the most perilous of your fuckups and tribulations he was really quite stoic. An ash-white pillar of cool. After you won, it was like all his humanness had popped out like a confetti cannon.

“Mate,” you reply, offering a sleepy grin, “if I minded any less, I would stop breathing, and that would just be a goddamn pickle for all parties involved.”

Dirk doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t ask again, which is just as much a sign that he believes you. You relax into the chair and give it a few experimental twists, left-right-left.

His workshop is what you sometimes imagine his home to have looked like: as time on your new planet went by, little trinkets and doodles popped up on the walls and along one side of the desk. That in itself is a great slab of alchemized metal that Roxy helped him with, hugging two walls in an L shape. There are no curtains on the windows. Moonlight of a colour you can’t recall the name of catches in the translucence of his hair.

It’s two-thirty in the morning. Dirk’s text for company had shot something through your blood, that same funny fire that you distantly recall from the Session; a quiet little supernova. You were here in eight minutes flat.

“I can make coffee,” Dirk offers, with this funny little creak in his voice.

“No fuss, I got it.”

It’s a process, this whole relearning thing. A pain in the arse and a pain in the rest of you—you miss the days where you and Dirk could simply square up and tussle out your hormonal shittery. You push off the desk with your feet to wheel the chair over to the coffee stand. Another one of Roxy’s additions. _You will bleed beans someday, Di-Stri._

You scoop grounds into the filter and ask, as nonchalant as possible, “So what did you want me for?” It still sounds a little chalant. You add another scoop of joe.

“I thought I made it clear in the text.” Dirk’s confusion always has a tiny aftertaste of guilt to it: you learned this the first time you kissed him.

“On a level,” you concede. The mini-fridge is full of orange Jones; the one closest to the milk has Terezi’s left eye and most of her nose in unfocused black and white plastered on the label. “But you’re not a company man when you work, champ. It makes your hair stand on end.”

Dirk reaches up as if to check it, pulling some of it back with a teeny pink elastic. “Very intuitive of you,” he says, “and a little wiseassy.” (You wink.) “I don’t feel comfortable finishing this project on my own.”

You could say: _you never feel comfortable, it doesn’t bloody matter whether or not you’re on your own_. You could say: _why do you always wait to ask until you’re three sheets to the fucking wind?_

“Three sugars, Dirk?”

“Two,” he replies. The coffee machine squeals sadly to life.

It is 2:37 in the morning.

* * *

 

You find Dirk’s project before he summons the bollocks to show you. It doesn’t sting as much as you thought it would. The body is tucked neatly between the two far legs of the table. It’s curled up almost as if in sleep.

When you glance back, all Dirk says is, “It’s a little overdue.”

You give his shoulder a squeeze when you finish his coffee—he’s sitting on the desk with his legs kind of askew, like they have no idea where they’re supposed to go.

“Shall I fetch it? Er, him?”

He gives a grateful nod, setting down the shades he was fiddling with to take a swig of java. You’re not sure where he got the AR, if he unmashed it from the sprite or if he had a backup somewhere. If a little piece of his was chipping off again and he coaxed it along, unthinkingly.

It’s light, the body. Some of the trolls enjoy the rough-and-tumble of fisticuffs, and you’re in reasonable shape. Dirk clears a spot on the desk beside him and helps you prop it against the wall; its legs stick out straight. A familiar shock of hair has been moulded over features you would know in any dream.

“I have to test the cortex implants,” he says, when you’re starting to worry he’s not breathing. “I wanted to wait til morning, but—”

“You’d be loony with it,” you finish, “your brain would be mould in a fuckawful shit pond.”

He puffs air through his nostrils. “Put on some tunes, will you? It’s too fuckin quiet.”

It’s the ocean he misses, you think. The metronomic crash of whitecaps and the shriek of gulls; marketable white noise he got for free, at the expense of civilization. Your best chum in all of existence thinks way too much for his own good.

You pick up this old-looking iPod and flip through playlists. This must be on loan from his brother—they all have names like “sweet jams,” “diabetic tunage,” “gfskdghdskfs,” “its 4am,” and one labelled “KARKAT VANTAS’ AUDIO COMPILATION DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES P” before the title space ran out. You hit shuffle on that one, and some awful garbled junk struggles out of the little box. “Christ on a cracked-pepper cracker, I think it’s broken.”

“Nah,” says Dirk, “that’s perfect.”

* * *

 

Dirk’s room and workshop are on the second floor of this house, soundproof so his midnight futzing doesn’t wake his brother or Karkat, who claim the first floor as theirs. It means you can crank the ungodly hacksaw of noise from the player and toss him the tools he needs while you scald your tongues on coffee, waiting for the past to clean your clocks.

“You know,” you say, when the drink warms your throat enough, “you know he’ll be cheesed as all-get-out.”

“I know.” Dirk lifts hair from the body’s nape and plugs some wires he stripped off the shades. “I’m mad at myself all the time.”

Then he does this funny thing, like a kiss, to the artificial skin just under the wire, at the base of the spine. You can see his breath: it mists and crackles like a fucking wisp.

The AR opens his eyes. Not suddenly, but you still jump a little. Coffee paints your pyjama shirt.

“Jake,” says Hal. You feel very, very small.

“To business,” declares Dirk in a way that tells you he feels the same.

* * *

 

“—huge fucking baby who can’t take responsibility for his own selfish dumbshit games, have you learned _anything_? A single, minuscule goddamn increment of wisdom? Is this some new saviour complex you dredged up while I was crammed in the Plastic Sweat Limbo of a thousand days? Fucking _answer_ me!”

Dirk is motionless, his hands in his lap; every now and then, one of his palms will come up and drag along the side of his neck, a tic that sprang up not long after you all touched down here.

Hal’s been at it for about five straight minutes. Like a set of fucking bagpipes, he is, you’re pretty certain he doesn’t have any kind of squeezebox or air filtration system. Then again, you know jack frog-shitting squat about robots, except that they have excelled in the pummel department before. Hal’s weapon of choice seems a lot more personal.

He keeps going. “God. _God_ , I can read you like a fucking thermal cam. You’re a study in regret, Dirk, painted all kinds of ugly.”

You want so badly to step in, do something practical, not even heroic or nothing, just mundane shit to stop the hail of verbal artillery fire. Dirk just looks at you, his face smooth as sea stones, and gives a tiny _no_ shake of his head.

Hal suddenly stops mid-bitch, his eyes kind of going wide: they’re a hell of a thing, human in all but the onyx filling where yours are white. You wonder if that’s Roxy’s gatherings, too, or if this is all Dirk, spilled out from his sorry soul. His jaw works a little more, soundless.

Your knuckles are pale around your mug. “What’s wrong?”

But Dirk just sighs and stirs to life again, raising his hands to open a thin panel at the base of Hal’s shoulder blade. You hadn’t even seen any seams. “The body needed time to warm up before I could finish calibrations,” he says, more to himself than to either of you.

Hal grimaces, and when Dirk finds the right whatsit to fiddle with a noise stutters free—nothing like a groan, more just a release of sound, like if an airtight jar’s pop had Dirk’s voice. “ _Great_.”

And if Dirk’s voice were somehow able to drip with more sarcasm.

You examine the bottom of your coffee mug, letting all the words you’ve been stockpiling roll freely in your mouth like a rogue lexical derby, swallowing all the pointiest ones. “You’re about done with the mopes, then, are you?”

Hal looks at you like he’d forgotten you’re there. Maybe he had, who’s to say? You forget to make yourself known, sometimes, too busy with taking everything in. It’s one of the things you and Dirk occasionally have in common. “Don’t patronize me,” is all he says, and it sounds so painfully _childish_ , so much like your friend and like yourself that you almost laugh and fuck it all up in one go.

“Not in a million years, mate. Look, you’re pissed. Who hasn’t been pissed at Dirk before?”

“Thanks, man.”

You offer Dirk your best and most obvious _give me a second_ stare, tight-lipped and high-browed. “Let him have a go at this for you. Get it all out while he works out the kinks, see where you end up.”

“That’s surprisingly not a terrible concept,” says Hal. His tone is a thin tightrope between the deadpan of automata and the high-low of, again, the boy you’re closest to. Gooseflesh rises along your thighs.

Dirk adjusts his legs, sifting through Hal’s hair. It’s silvery, and looks soft even from here. You want to touch it; you sit on your hands. “Raise your arms for me,” he says, still quiet. Like Hal is a deer in your woods that he might spook if he so much as sneezes.

Hal raises them anyway. The skin is smooth, so unlike Brobot that it takes you a moment to realize you’re still gaping. You wrench your attention instead to his face: Hal looks like he’s sprinting his way through the five stages of grief, then tumbling back to the first and starting over again. Expressions are strange on his face, so similar to Dirk’s and yet so...open.

Jiminy, you’re in over your head here, your chair lazily listing to the side.

“It feels strange,” he says finally.

“Testing your nerve receptors?” You ask, removing one hand from under your arse to wet your mouth with caffeine.

“Having arms.”

Dirk looks away, adjusting settings you can only guess at by touch alone. Some nights, when you share a bed and quizzical silence, he does the same to you: he navigates the squaring plane of your jaw, the slope of your brow bone. You do the same, at the almost hilariously off-white tan lines around his eyes. You skirt around each other like nervous prey animals. You are _winners_ , damn it to heck! Damn it to _fucking_ heck!

Breaking the silence becomes easier as you go, even if you still aren’t any clearer on the whole ‘right things to say’ business. “Lots of things are strange about living.”

“I’ve been alive this whole time,” Hal snaps, each syllable like razor wire. Something in Dirk’s throat bobs. “I mean—I was—”

Dirk flips something again, and Hal folds in on himself before jerking back up. The wide-eyed look is back on his face.

“Spinal action is good.”

“Oh, for the love of—” You lob your empty mug at Dirk, who catches it with one hand before finally looking up at you: his shades are still on the desk, and his eyes look...not pained, not really, but something more resigned. It exhausts you to look at. “Switch places with me.”

He blinks. His lashes are tiny ghosts. “Excuse me?”

“I speak English same as you. Better, probably, my vernacular is the envy of lyricists the world over. So I have absolute confidence you understood me, Dirk Strider, switch places with me.”

Dirk mostly looks stunned now, which on his face is a bit of a slack expression, like an invisible mask has fallen halfway. Hal looks like he’s trying not to move too much and that it’s making his entire body itch.

Then he says, “Fine,” and slides off the desk. Your shoulders brush when you haul yourself up.

“See? No one exploded.” Hal is very cool under your fingers, the skin smooth and almost eerily lifelike. You don’t know what to make of it, but it has been a hell of a long time since you’ve known what to make of anything. “All you have to do is tell me what doodads to finagle with and we are going to chug this pain train to a station that’s a touch less masochistic. And it will be peachy! The _fucking_ _peachiest_.”

Hal snorts. You didn’t know, again, that robots were capable of that.

Dirk melts into the chair, at least as much as the tension in his shoulders will allow. You notice, dimly, that Hal is copying his posture. You don’t know if it’s a programming thing, or just a habit that neither notices. “Close the spine port,” he says like a surrender pennant.

You comply. It snicks shut, and Hal hesitantly rolls his shoulders.

“He needs his touch receptors calibrated,” says Dirk, and you look at him like he’s just told you that surprise, the world is going to end again and you have drying coffee on your second-favourite Spielberg-themed shirt.

“How in the bloody blue blazes am I supposed to do that?”

“Aren’t you the one who just told me to tell you what doohickeys to fuck around with?”

“More or less verbatim, I suppose—”

“Turn him towards you and check his palms and fingers.”

“I,” interrupts Hal with volume that gradually overtakes Karkat’s broken-glass atrocity, “am _right fucking here_ , Dirk. Right here!”

Dirk opens his mouth, but no sound comes out, like his own circuits have finally fried. Your island had many things, left for you by dead relatives and sent to you by your friends, but none of them were instruction manuals.

You give it the old college try anyway, rolling your t-shirt sleeves to your shoulders so your farmer’s tan almost glows in the dim moonlight. “Legs up on the desk, then, amigo.”

Hal moves them slowly, like he wasn’t expecting you to actually stick up for him. It wrenches something between your ribs. The slow movement might also have something to do with his lack of limb coordination: He jerks one foot high enough to almost knock your glasses right off your schnozz, windmilling for balance.

Dirk is out of the chair faster than you can blink, steadying the arm and leg closest to him.

This close to each other, with mirrored surprise on their faces, you can see the differences: the constellations of freckles over the bridge of Dirk’s nose; the little pulse of Hal’s irises; the veins in Dirk’s hands; the thin lines of wiring that run just under Hal’s skin. You help Hal find his balance, spinning him on his keister and folding his legs at the knees.

“Okay?” You say. It has a funny kind of echo, and you attribute it to the acoustics or the song that is only _beginning_ to sound catchy (which is how you know you’re doomed) before realizing Dirk has also asked the same thing.

Hal, again, is a tableau of _holy shit, that’s happening._ “Okay.”

You grasp his arm at the elbow, coaxing a bend that he stares at the entire time so his hand is facing you, fingers splayed. You find a panel some two inches beneath his wrist that Dirk points at silently and open it: Hal’s inner workings are so...so _delicate_ that you find yourself staring in wonder. At Dirk’s time, his care. At the boy in front of you, because that’s what he is, isn’t it?

“A finger at a time,” coaxes Dirk, so quiet you almost imagine it. Sound fades away. You feel a focus you had almost forgotten about, from back when pine needles crunched under your boots and no living soul that wasn’t bone-white and alien lived for miles and miles and miles.

You pinch Hal’s little finger, and don’t allow him to jerk his arm back when he tries.

“Ow,” he protests, “that hurt.” And then it hits him. “...that hurt. Holy shit.”

At his other side, Dirk almost smiles. “Finger five function is normal. Finger four, Jake?”

You pinch the next one, at all three knuckles for good measure. Hal yelps again, and then does something unbelievable, which is laugh.

It colours the air around you, as he flicks and flexes his joints. You press on, soldierly in all but the dorky grin stretching your cheeks. When you get to his thumb, you abandon all good sense and press a quick kiss to it.

Hal makes that stuttering noise again, the little Morse code of sound, and you drop his hand to raise your own in surrender, shooting Dirk a look that you would otherwise have reserved for kicking, like, a puppy.

He’s staring at your mouth. He continues to do so for another five incredibly long seconds before giving himself a shake and turning to Hal. “I didn’t give you the ability to blush.”

“That may be the first intelligent move you’ve ever made with regards to my entire goddamn existence,” says Hal.

Dirk rolls his eyes, and you can see—no, you can _hear_ the way his shoulders lose their rigidity, and he picks up Hal’s other hand, pressing a kiss to his wrist. This one sparks, too.

In another fit of bravado, you hold out your hand, like the cosmos might want to high-five you. Hal is the one to seize it. You’re all locked in some strange little pat-a-cake, which is certainly something, because none of you were ever in pat-a-cake-playable scenarios. Indeed, the only game you really played together kind of royally sucked.

“Jake.”

You’re not sure which of them spoke, so all you can do is offer a strained “yello” in response.

“Do we have any more coffee?”

Hal’s shoulders lower almost completely. “I’ll make some more,” you reply, hesitant to drop his hand. Dirk’s has snaked its way up your forearm, the sneaky bugger.

“Can I have some?” asks Hal.

“You may certainly not.”

It’s three-fifteen in the morning. The coffee machine groans back to life, and by the time the last of all your defenses are torn down none of you realize that the music stopped long before the sun rises.


End file.
